Art Pass!

As things have been winding up on The Director’s Cut, I’ve been able to do a certain amount of work on New Game+ finally! Over the last 9 months while I’ve been working on the PlayStation ports, I’ve literally only had the time and energy to work on New Game+’s soundtrack (which has a lot of tunes now) but none for the game itself.

But I’ve managed to do some work on it, including an art pass, quite recently as things have been quieter while Curve wrap up the ports. I converted all the art to a new, simpler 32 colour palette (to match the Amiga, the game machine which I grew up on). This means the look is more coherent, if less ‘detailed’, and another good thing is that it makes the rest of the art a lot quicker to do. There is a lot of art to do for this game, so that’s a good thing.

Here’s a comparison between the NEW EXTERIOR:

… and an OLD EXTERIOR:

(I was trying to get closer to the original mockup:)

Here’s a NEW INTERIOR:

… and an OLD INTERIOR:

So, although it’s a subtle change, it’s hopefully going to make things look better, while being quicker to produce! Let me know what you think of the new look!

My excitement has not waned! I’m so glad we have new New Game+ news! I can’t wait ’till we can start talking about mechanics and control schemes. I had this idea that i wanna toss out there just for the heck of it: maybe to add some of the strategic depth of a souls game there could be a button you hold to maintain direction while moving or rolling, or perhaps two simultaneous directional controls, one for movement and one for “aim”, which would allow you to sort-of circle someone and continue facing them. If it was doable, a simple lock on could work I suppose. Anyway, just some thoughts I had while being hyped!

i already settled on a lock-on mechanic, after trying a lot of different things. it works nicely for circling / ‘kiting’, and the AI has been taught how to do this. it’s really important to protect your back in this game as, even though there’s not a specific ‘backstab’ move, hits do a large percent more damage from behind. this means locking-on enables shield users especially to back away safely, enables players to focus more on range and angle than facing direction, and of course it looks really cool when two players lock onto each other and circle each other Western-style!

Nice I’m excited for this game. What are the odds of new game+ being ported over to consoles? (Sorry, but I’d rather play a game with a controller rather than a keyboard despite me liking LS on steam I’m very excited for the console release).

cheers! i would say the odds are pretty high, but it’ll probably still lead on Mac and PC as Lone Survivor did. it already supports 4 x PS3 or 4 x Xbox controllers on PC, anyway as it’s not constrained by Flash technology…